


One Percent

by MindfulWrath



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Horror, Isolation, Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4955467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MindfulWrath/pseuds/MindfulWrath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a fire, and now the International Space Station is empty, a bastion of light and sound amongst the dark and the silence.<br/>Well, mostly empty.<br/>Hopefully empty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Percent

Ninety-nine percent of everything is silence.

I'm not just saying that to be poetic—although you gotta admit, that's a pretty damn good line—but I'm mostly saying it so that when I say 'the station was silent' you'll understand that I _don't_ mean 'there was no noise.' There was a lot of noise, loud, ubiquitous, all of it inorganic. It's just that there's so much _un-sound_ outside of this fragile aluminum bubble that it cancels out. You never do forget about the un-sound out there, no matter how noisy it gets.

So.

The station was silent, and had been for three months.

We don't usually come up here alone. We don't  _ever_ come up here alone, in fact. I came up with three other people, all crammed into a tin can and shot up here on a glorified missile.

They're dead now.

I was on an EVA when the fire broke out. I was the only one on an EVA when the fire broke out. Technically it was a  _deflagration,_ which is a fancy way of saying it was an explosion that skipped leg day. The oxygen tank had been venting into the cabin for at least ten hours, but because  _too much oxygen_ isn't something you notice, and because it happened so fast, we didn't get any alarms or warnings or anything. Not sure where the spark came from, either, but it did, and then—

_Whoomph._

It wasn't the fire that killed them. Sure, they got burned all to hell, but it didn't kill them. No, they suffocated, after the whole tiny atmosphere went  _whoomph_ and suddenly wasn't anymore.

And there was me, floating out there in the silence with the whole damn Earth looming over my shoulder, and the damn sun in my face, and a bunch of fucking static in my ear because the radios just burned up.

I tried. I really did. I tried to contact them inside, tried to radio Houston, hell, I even tapped on the window. I could see them moving inside, and then I could see them stop moving, and suddenly I was looking at a metal balloon full of dead people.

I stayed out for a lot longer than I should have, trying to radio home, trying to get any kind of signal, but there was nothing. For all Houston knew, we were  _all_ dead—and we might have been, soon, if I didn't get my ass in gear.

Must've sucked for them, down in Houston. Right in the middle of a sentence, everything nominal, having a joke and then  _WHOOMPH._ Everybody dead, the end.

I eventually got back around to the airlock, even if my hands were shaking so bad I couldn't work the MMU for shit and just had to climb back up my tether, hand-over-hand. It took a few years to pressurize the airlock, and I didn't bother getting out of my suit—no sense in suffocating just yet. The various -ers on board—scrubbers, dehumidifiers, purifiers—not to mention the leaky oxygen tank, would have the station breathable again before my suit ran out of juice, but it would take a while, and I had a bunch of crispy fried astronauts to get rid of anyway.

You're not supposed to jettison your dead crewmates out the airlock, but I thought, what the hell, there's no way I'm taking the Soyuz back with five dead guys, and being cremated by the atmosphere is a way cooler funeral than anyone could hope for anyway, and it's probably how they would've wanted to go.

You know. Barring the whole, agonizing death aspect. Pretty sure that wasn't in the Hopes and Dreams column of their personality evals.

I'm never wearing that suit again. If I could have, I'd have blasted it out the airlock with the dead guys, but I still needed it. The station would still take hours to get breathable again and I wasn't spending one second longer than I had to with those bodies.

Not that jettisoning things out the airlock is easy. The door opens inwards, so it literally  _can't_ be opened when the airlock is pressurized. And you can only open it manually, so I had to be in there with the bodies and shove them out into the Big Dark Out-There by hand—another reason why I couldn't get rid of the suit. They hung out outside the station for a few days before drifting off, so I just stayed away from the rear windows and pretended they weren't there. I still stay away from the rear windows, just in case.

It's kind of ironic, that little miss Happiest When I'm Alone ended up being the loneliest human in existence. I mean,  _technically_ I'm only about two hundred and fifty miles from the next nearest human, but let's face it, nobody's getting up here, so I might as well be two hundred and fifty  _thousand_ miles away. Besides, right now I'm over the big blue Pacific, so until Hawaii comes over the horizon, I'm calling it: loneliest human in existence.

I haven't used that airlock again, since. Pieces of the bodies were flaking off. Besides that, it was hard enough getting  _out_ of the suit on my own, it'd be next to impossible to get back  _in._ And besides, what could possibly be out there?

Nothing. There is nothing out there but a bunch of shiny trash and five crispy dead bodies.

There is  _nothing_ out there.

So now the million-dollar question: why haven't I gone home? Why have I been stuck up here in this big ugly balloon for three months all by myself?

Well, there's this little thing called _I'm not a pilot,_ and sure, I landed the simulation Soyuz safely about a hundred times, but that was different, and I don't know how burned the inside of the Soyuz is in the places where it counts and I don't want my glorious homeward journey to end in a great big crunch and a whole lot of dust.

That, or I'd drown. Or die of exposure. Or get shot by some asshole in the middle of nowhere.

So I'm trying to fix the radio, and it's really fucking hard, because I am not an electrical engineer and I have no fucking clue how radios work, god dammit.

So don't tell NASA this, but I kind of like not having to run by their schedules anymore. I mean there's something to be said for having every hour of your day planned out to the last minute, and it's not like we didn't have free time, but seriously, it gets _old._ Which isn't to say that I haven't had my hands full staying alive up here after the fire and trying to tell Houston I'm not dead, but after three months the shine wears off of that and you just kind of settle in.

I look out the windows a lot. Well, _some_ of the windows. The Big Dark Out-There gets kind of old after a while. It's pretty and all, but it doesn't change much, right? So I mostly look at Earth.

Okay, I _only_ look at Earth. But there's nothing else to look at, really, because nothing Out There changes, _ever,_ at least not in a way that we can perceive on human timescales, which is why I _definitely_ didn't see something moving out there because that is _impossible,_ so I look at Earth because it moves all the time and it keeps things interesting.

I look at Earth a _lot._

They must be monitoring me, however they can. Radar-tracking, that kind of thing. I've been wondering if I could alter course slightly, or something, to tell them I'm alive—hell, rotate the solar panels, even, I bet they could tell.

But the thing about that is, I don't want to _die,_ and I can't fly a space station, and the whole point of all of this is to _not_ burn up in the atmosphere, so I'm not touching the orbital mechanics side of things. I'm just going to have to fix this radio. Somehow. Hey, third month's the charm.

Maybe they _do_ know I'm alive, but they have no way of contacting me. If I can't transmit, I definitely can't receive. But the radio does both, and I don't know enough about radios to know how to fix just one part, and I wouldn't even if I could because I want to _talk_ to somebody who isn't me.

They might be able to tell me what I'm supposed to do about the noises.

I've said it before: this station makes a LOT of noise. I'm used to it making noise. It hums and whirrs and sometimes it creaks when the sun hits it just right and for just long enough and a lot of stuff rattles and clicks and beeps. I'm used to the noise.

What I'm not used to are the _noises._

I changed the air filters three times in a row. It wasn't that. I even poked around back in there with a fork wrapped in a dish cloth to see if there was a blockage. There wasn't. I checked the various -ers and all the tanks and intakes and vents. A lot of it was charred, but I cleaned that up weeks ago and, well, the noises happen, so it can't be that. I found a lot of hair and skin—most of it is probably mine—and some socks I thought I'd lost, because everything you lose ends up at the air intake, eventually. I've been thinking I might have to give up and wrestle my way back into a suit for an EVA, to see if there's something on the outside of the station that got knocked loose or something and is making the noises.

Except I don't want to go out there, in case something Out There is making the noises.

Which it isn't, because there's nothing out there, and definitely nothing that _moves,_ and definitely nothing that _scurries,_ and definitely _definitely_ _ **definitely**_ nothing that fucking _breathes._

So that's not what the noises are. Not movement. Not scurrying.  _ Not _ breathing. They just kind of sound like them, because human brains like to pretend there are always other humans around. It's why three dots in a triangle looks like a face going  _ oo! _ It's why the surf sounds like breath. It's why the wind 'whistles' and fog creeps and it's why everybody and their brother has a thunder god.

Things rattle in pipes if they get stuck in there. They even rattle back and forth, I'm sure. I don't really know how the ventilation is set up. It could alternate, I don't know. Houston will know.

The station expands in the sunlight. That's what metal does when you heat it up, and it goes  _ ping cling pop bang _ and sometimes,  _ sometimes _ it sounds like something is breathing in the pipes but  _ it's just the sunlight _ because I am alone on this fucking tin can piece of shit and if I  _ weren't _ I would've known it way before now.

Because  _ there. Is. Nothing. Out. There. _ There is nothing out here but me and this noisy grubby shitty metal balloon and there is  _ nothing _ Out There but silence.

Well.

Ninety-nine percent of it is silence.

 


End file.
